During the first three years of the war, therefore, the Royal Navy was primarily used in support of operations on land, aiding General Thomas Gage and General Sir William Howe during the siege of Boston by seeking stores for the army and in supplying naval brigades.
The naval force at the disposal of the American admirals commanding on the North American station was insufficient to patrol the long coastline. The administration of Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had ambitious plans to upgrade the fleet, but this had not been completed when the war began. It was estimated that only 39 ships of the line could be battle ready in the first year of a conflict. When the war began, the British had 131 ships of the line, but the Royal Navy was in neglect from rapid and poor quality ship construction during the Seven Years' War. 5 Final New World operations, 1781–1782.This second period lasted from the summer of 1778 to the middle of 1783, and it included operations already been in progress in America or for the protection of commerce, and naval campaigns on a great scale carried out by the fleets of the maritime powers. During the second period, the successive interventions of France, Spain, and the Netherlands extended the naval war until it ranged from the West Indies to the Bay of Bengal. The first ranges from 1771 until the winter of 1779, as the Royal Navy was engaged in cooperating with the troops employed against the American revolutionaries, on the coasts, rivers and lakes of North America, or in endeavouring to protect British commerce against the enterprise of American privateers. The naval operations of the American Revolutionary War (also, mostly in British usage, American War of Independence), divide themselves naturally into two periods.
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